Here's more of a perlish way to get what you want, which is what you seemed to be asking for:

open(PS, "ps -ef |") or die "Problem invoking 'ps': $!\n";
while (<PS>) {
  next unless /$version/ && /online/;
  my($pid) = (split)[2];
  print "pid $pid\n";
}
close(PS);
[download]

Cheers,
Matt

P.S. If you want to access the value of $pid outside of the while loop, drop the 'my' but keep the parens, but that will break if there's more than one match:

while (<PS>) {
  next unless /$version/ && /online/;
  ($pid) = (split)[2];
}
print "pid $pid\n";
[download]